Recommended Books

“A parent’s right to care and companionship of his or her children are so fundamental, as to be guaranteed protection under the First, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution.” In re: J.S. and C., 324 A 2d 90; supra 129 NJ Super, at 489.

Recommended Books

The Baby Scoop Era Research Initiative recommends the following books:

“Adoption Healing, A Path To Recovery For Moms” by Karen Wilson Buterbaugh and Joe Soll. Adoption Healing … A Path to Recovery for Mothers Who Lost Children to Adoption is a unique book. The reader is provided with a description of the immaculate deception imposed on pregnant women and the ensuing tragedy of the loss of their babies to adoption and the profound effects on their lives. This is followed by different methods of healing the mother’s wounds, including inner child work, visualizations, healing affirmations, and anger management. Every chapter includes a Myths and Realities of adoption section, a summary of the chapter and exercises to do on one’s own.

“Adoption Healing, A Path To Recovery “ by Joe Soll. In this book, the reader is provided with a description of the unfolding of the adoptee’s personality from birth, detailing each developmental milestone along the way, followed by different methods of healing the adoptee’s wounds, including inner child work, visualizations, healing affirmations, and anger management. Every chapter includes a Myths and Realities of adoption section, a summary of the chapter and exercises to do on one’s own.

“Evil Exchange”, a novel by Joe Soll and Lori Paris. Imagine you are adopted, and find out that as an infant, you were sold on the black market by a notorious baby seller who falsified your birth certificate. Your world is shattered. Your life has been a lie. The truth seems unattainable unless you can find someone to help you get back what was stolen, your real identity. Todd Walters is a man on such a quest. With the aid of a former private investigator, Boots Beaumont, the two men will begin a search into the unknown.

“Unlearning Adoption” ” by Jessica DelBalzo. “Unlearning Adoption: A Guide to Family Preservation and Protection” is the culmination of ten years worth of research into past and present adoption practices, the aftermath of adoption for surrendering parents and adopted people, and the unethical laws and lies that permeate adoption today.

In this deeply moving work, Ann Fessler brings to light the lives of hundreds of thousands of young single American women forced to give up their newborn children in the years following World War II and before Roe v. Wade. The Girls Who Went Away tells a story not of wild and carefree sexual liberation, but rather of a devastating double standard that has had punishing long-term effects on these women and on the children they gave up for adoption. Based on Fessler’s groundbreaking interviews, it brings to brilliant life these women’s voices and the spirit of the time, allowing each to share her own experience in gripping and intimate detail. Today, when the future of the Roe decision and women’s reproductive rights stand squarely at the front of a divisive national debate, Fessler brings to the fore a long-overlooked history of single women in the fifties, sixties, and early seventies.

In 2002, Fessler, an adoptee herself, traveled the country interviewing women willing to speak publicly about why they relinquished their children. Researching archival records and the political and social climate of the time, she uncovered a story of three decades of women who, under enormous social and family pressure, were coerced or outright forced to give their babies up for adoption. Fessler deftly describes the impossible position in which these women found themselves: as a sexual revolution heated up in the postwar years, birth control was tightly restricted, and abortion proved prohibitively expensive or life endangering. At the same time, a postwar economic boom brought millions of American families into the middle class, exerting its own pressures to conform to a model of family perfection. Caught in the middle, single pregnant women were shunned by family and friends, evicted from schools, sent away to maternity homes to have their children alone, and often treated with cold contempt by doctors, nurses, and clergy.

The majority of the women Fessler interviewed have never spoken of their experiences, and most have been haunted by grief and shame their entire adult lives. A searing and important look into a long-overlooked social history, The Girls Who Went Away is their story.